It’s been a while since I’ve typed that. The holidays, kids home from college, catching up on work, yadda yadda. That’s all behind me, and I’ve actually had a chance to do some extracurricular reading.

Here’s the best stuff I came across this week:

A Narrowed Gaze (Columbia Journalism Review) – Former Wall Street Journal staffer Dean Starkman examines business journalism leading up to the financial crisis and asks – to paraphrase Jon Stewart of all people – “How could so many journalists covering a beat so closely miss something so big so completely?” Good question. Starkman is writing a book on the subject, The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: the Financial Crisis and the Financial Press, due out in fall 2012. Looking forward to it.

How One Bit of Stupidity Could Have Brought Down a Multi-million Dollar Media Company (Shankman.com) – Beware – or be aware of – airplane seatmates. On a plane ride from Florida to NYC, P.R. guy Peter Shankman sat next to a guy whose reading material for the flight was a prospectus for a well-known media company that’s apparently for sale. Shankman doesn’t say which one – but he got an eyeful, and even snapped photos of the prospectus, which he includes with the post (with incriminating material redacted). His lesson: when it comes to confidential information, don’t be stupid. My takeaway as a reporter: be aware of your surroundings, you never know when you might stumble onto the makings of a great scoop.

Unbroken - I’m finally getting around to reading Laura Hillenbrand’s biography of 1936 Olympic standout and World War II hero Louie Zamperini, her follow up to bestseller Seabiscuit. I’m about a third of the way through the book, which showcases the meticulous research and recreation of detail that has become Hillenbrand’s hallmark. Last night I left “Zamp” and two other men in shark-infested waters – can’t wait to see what happens next.

And some industry news:

Can newspapers be tech incubators? (GigaOm) – Why yes, they can, and are, Mathew Ingram writes. He cites the Philadelphia News Network, which just launched the Project Liberty incubator, and Digital First Media, which owns the Detroit News, Denver Post and San Jose Mercury News, which has created a venture capital arm to invest in media startups. Another example: the Oregonian announced today partnerships with 50 Oregon blogs, part of a year-old Oregon News Network community blog project. New bloggers run the gamut from birding to local economics.

NewsRight: a Game Changer for Online Journalism? (Mashable) - Associated Press, The New York Times Co., The Washington Post Co. and more than two dozen other news organizations have started a digital licensing service to “provide authorized access to the best original reporting and related analytics for convenient use across digital platforms.” According to Mashable’s report, the company’s technology will track “websites, blogs and other Internet aggregators to measure the spread of its participants’ content.” In other words, they’re making sure content aggregators, HuffPost and anybody else aren’t ripping off and using what isn’t theirs without paying for it (my analysis).

Tool of the week for journalists – ProPublica’s TimelineSetter (Journalism.co.uk) – A nifty tool for creating beautiful interactive timelines.

In case you missed them the first time around, here are the WordCount posts people were buzzing about this month:

• 10 reasons to clean out your office – now!
• Recommended reading for Nov. 18 – Occupy Portland photo
• 10 ways to find new freelance clients
• 10 phrases freelancers hate to hear
• 6 writing lessons from Pulitzer-winning biographer Stacy Schiff
• Top tax tips for freelancers

Photo by Randy Rasmussen/Oregonian

To do great writing, read great writing. Here’s the great writing I’ve been reading this week:

I don’t write about local news, but I read it. This week I’ve been closely monitoring the Occupy Portland decampment and subsequent protests, which have included a walkout of Portland State University students, several marches, and yesterday’s N17 occupation of several downtown Portland branches of national banks.

I’ve read a lot, in the Oregonian, the Portland Mercury, online, on Twitter and Facebook.

Nothing I’ve read comes close to having the impact of a single photograph of the confrontation between Occupy Portland protesters and the Portland Police Department taken on Nov. 17.

I’m sharing a copy here so readers see what I’m talking about, but to really appreciate the impact, see the full image on the OregonLive.com website. Long-time Oregonian photographer Randy Rasmussen captured the split second a Portland police officer pepper sprayed a young woman directly in the face. Her eyes are closed, her mouth open, either in suprise or because she’s shouting something. It’s at once animated and chilling – the rag-tag protesters on one side and on the other, a sea of  black helmeted cops that look like they could be from Star Wars.

The photo has gone viral, as the Oregonian‘s Noelle Crombie notes in this story. The Atlantic Wire says the photo “may become the defining image of this week of Occupy unrest.” According to the Atlantic:

But in the confusion and impending darkness on Thursday evening, Rasmussen was shooting blind. He said he didn’t see the photo until his editor did, as they went through the day’s frames together that night.

Aside from being a striking embodiment of the old “picture is worth 1,000 words” saying, what does this have to do with writing?

Remember what Rasmussen said – he didn’t know what he had until later. He was just trying to capture as much information as he could a the time.

Think of that when you’re researching a story, or conducting an interview. Gather as much information as possible without regard for how you’re going to use it. There will always be time later to shift through the material: who knows, maybe you too will uncover something you didn’t realize was there.

To do great writing, read great writing. Here’s the great writing I’ve been reading this week:

In honor of Veteran’s Day here in the United States, I’m taking a break from recounting the best news stories I’ve read this week and using this space to honor journalists who cover armed conflicts, including journalists who’ve died this year.

According to the Committee to Project Journalists, 38 journalists have died so far in 2011. Eight were killed during crossfire or combat. The rest died while on dangerous assignments or were murdered. Most were killed in countries such as Pakistan, Libya, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Afghanistan.

According to CPJ, 24 percent of journalists who died this year were print reporters, 21 percent each were broadcast journalists, camera operators or photographers, 16 percent columnists or commentators and the rest editors, reporters for online-only outlets or publishers (some had more than one job which is why the numbers don’t add up to 100 percent).

It’s one thing to devote yourself to your job – and a lot of journalists do. If you check out We Are Journalists, you’ll see plenty of first-person entries from reporters who’ve made the conscious decision to take a job that doesn’t pay well because they think what they’re doing matters. But it’s something else entirely to put your life on the line in pursuit of a story.

War correspondents take that to the nth degree, and for a reason. I was too young to understand much about the Vietnam War except that my dad was in the Army reserve during that time, my aunt’s future husband was serving and there were always news stories about it on TV. It wasn’t until I was older and read Dispatches, Michael Herr’s autobiographical account of the war did I gain a better understanding of what happened and what it must have been like to be there, as a soldier and a reporter.

As part of Portland’s Literary Arts lecture series, I’m going to see Sebastian Junger in February 2012. Junger is probably better known as the author of The Perfect Storm. But his latest book War (2010) and Restrepo, the documentary he made at the same time, cover the time he spent embedded with a platoon of the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. I’ll blog about Junger’s talk here, as I’ve done with the other author talks I’ve been to in the series.

Do you have a favorite war correspondent, or war-time account written by a journalist? If so, leave it in a comment.

More than a few people I’ve talked to have described Schiff’s latest work, Cleopatra: A Life, as dense to the point of being impenetrable. “I’ve only gotten 40 pages into it despite three or four tries,” one friend says.

Nobody said reading or writing about historic figures is easy. It took my graduate school class months to get through The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s 1974 biography of  New York urban planner Robert Moses (which also won a Pulizer). But finishing it was like completing a course not only in biography but also in political power, city planning, and how the physical shape of present-day New York City came to be.

If you stick with them, the payoffs of reading biographies can be huge. Passages from Cleopatra are magic. Like this one, about the Rome that Cleopatra encountered when she moved there with Caesar:

If she spent any time in the thick of the city, Cleopatra found herself amid a gloomy welter of crooked, congested streets, with no main avenue and no central plan, among muddy pigs and soup vendors and artisans’ shops that tumbled out onto footways. By every measure a less salubrious city than Alexandria, Rome was squalid and shapeless, an oriental tangle of narrow, poorly ventilated streets and ceaseless, shutter-creaking commotion, perpetually in shadow, stiflingly hot in summer….Given the frequency with which pots propelled themselves from ledges, the smart man, warned Juvenal, went to dinner only after having made his will. Cleopatra had any number of reasons to yearn for what a Latin poet would later term her “superficially civilized country.”

Schiff talked about the book, which is just out in paperback, the trials and tribulations of writing biographies and her writing process in general at a talk in Portland recently, part of the city’s Literary Arts author lecture series.

Here are some of the highlights:

1. Pick a genre that doesn’t intimidate you. In 1990 when Schiff left a publishing job at Simon & Schuster to write a book, she says she purposely picked biography because it didn’t feel as intimidating as quitting to write a novel. There aren’t as many biographers in the world as there are novelists, so the stakes felt lower, she told the Literary Arts lecture audience.

2. Consider the source(s). Schiff jokes that the best biography subjects were born after typewriters were invented but before the advent of email. Printed materials make it easier on the writer, so you’re not stuck having to decipher impossible to fathom handwriting on original source material. But even worse, she says, is writing about someone living in the Internet age, because so much correspondence is now via email, which people don’t tend to save.

3. The Internet is OK, but original documents are better. These days it’s possible to find and read online versions of a lot of primary and secondary source materials. But Schiff still prefers to read the originals, even it it means traveling to a different city, state or country to do it. There’s something about touching documents, reading the person’s handwriting on the original and seeing the original ink that you can’t get from the microfilm or online version, she says.

4. Use an organization method that works for you. Schiff admits she’s no expert at organizing research materials. What works for her: for each book chapter, she creates what she calls an “ur document” that could run up to 100 pages long with notes collected from multiple sources. For each chapter, she refers back to the longer document as a guide.

5. Recognize when it’s time to start writing. Schiff knows it’s time to stop researching and start writing when she goes on interviews and is more familiar with details of the subject than the people she’s talking to. Another clue: when the structure of the story starts to naturally unfold in her head.

6. Branch out. Schiff’s next book deals with history but isn’t a biography. Instead, she’s writing about the Salem witch hunts, which has an enormous cast of main characters compared to her previous works, including the girls who were accused of being witches, townspeople and judges. But don’t expect to read it any time soon. In a recent CSPAN interview, Schiff told host Brian Lamb that it takes her four or five years to write a book and she’s only a couple months into the research.

Besides The Power Broker, here are some of my other favorite biographies:

• Seabiscuit, if a story about a racehorse can be called a biography, by Laura Hillenbrand. (Her latest, Unbroken, about war hero Louis Zamperini, is on my nightstand).
• The Operator, a biography of music mogul David Geffen, by Tom King.
• Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, by William D. Miller, one of my favorite professors when I was in grad school at Marquette University.

What biographies have you read recently? Please share your favorites by leaving a comment.

If you read anything from this week, make it the Los Angeles Times‘ series on cars and the poor, Wheels of Fortune. It’s timely, well reported and a potential game changer.

The report pulls back the curtain on Buy Here Pay Here car dealers, companies that sell used cars to people with little or no credit, charging them high interest rates, and when owners can’t make loan payments, repossessing the autos and reselling them again, and again.

In a world of instant news, it’s refreshing to read something that obviously took months to prepare. Read Part 3 close enough and you’ll pick up how Times reporter Ken Ben­sing­er describe one source taking multiple buses to work “on a hot summer afternoon.” It’s now early November, which means Bensinger and the editors and graphic designers who helped him on the package worked on this piece at least two months, if not longer. When was the last time you worked on a feature story for two months? This year I’ve worked on a total of one piece that took that long, and it was nowhere nearly as complex.

This is the kind of long-form non-fiction that’s getting a lot of hype thanks to the advent of online-only publishers such as Byliner and The Atavist. It’s also the kind of investigative journalism that nonprofits such as ProPublica began pursuing back in 2008 when the newspaper industry started to tank.

It’s nice to know that newspapers – at least some of them – still have the resources to invest in such important public service projects.

A Leading Pioneer (The New York Times) – There’s a reason the New York Times is one of the country’s best news organizations. They consistently come up with stories like this one, on Julia Brand-Chase, who 50 years ago defied the Amateur Athletic Union to run in a prestigious road race in Connecticut, paving the way for women to compete as long-distance runners. The story is a matter-of-fact retelling of the event and what it meant. But it has all the elements a great story should have, including a strong lead, great photos and a killer first quote from Brand-Chase: “Finishing that race was a defining moment for me. If I could handle that pressure, I realized I could go ahead and live my life as I wanted. I could do anything.”

Walter Isaacson Talks Steve Jobs, Apple’s Future (HuffingtonPost) – Former Newsweek editor Isaacson talks about writing Jobs’ biography, Steve Jobs, which debuted this week. Jobs was a fascinating storyteller, “I just listened,” Issacson says. Good advice.

The 10 Blog Posts You Should Write NOW (Hubspot) – The advice is geared toward businesses, but don’t let it fool you. Freelancers can easily adapt many of the ideas for their own blogs, including The Big List, The Breaking News Angle and The Unexpected Connection.

Other media news:

StreetFight – Laura Rich, a friend and former colleague at the now-defunct Industry Standard, launched a news site to track the hyperlocal news business last spring. Her first hyperlocal conference this week in New York attracted heavyweights of the industry. For more on who showed up and who said what, check out coverage on their website, including this video of Jeff Jarvis interviewing Foursquare general manager Evan Cohen.

SABEW Freelance Poll – The Society of American Business Editors and Writers is surveying freelance journalists on what they do and how much they make. Results of the anonymous survey will be tallied and presented by the end of 2011 on the SABEW website. Take the survey at this website.

WAE Network - This not-yet-launched social network promises writers the opportunity “to interact with agents and editors like never before!” We’ll see. The first 1,000 people who sign up for the launch get free lifetime access – whatever that means.

The Fighting Irish, under second-year head coach Brian Kelly, played its first night game in more than two decades. The stadium was packed with fans waving blue and white rally towels. The team upgraded to shiny gold helmets for the occasion.

Everything was perfect, except for one thing – the team didn’t play like they should have. A missed snap, a lackluster defense, penalties and other missteps cost them the game.

In football, you can have a million-dollar coach, the best recruiting system and the fanciest locker room. But if you don’t perform when it counts, none of it matters.

It’s the same in other professions. Think of actors or actresses who’ve been outstanding in one movie only to phone in their performance in their very next next film. Or a restaurant where the food and service is amazing on one visit, and mediocre or worse on the next.

It’s no different for writers. You could have clips from the highest circulation women’s magazines or the most prestigious newspapers in the country, you could have written bestselling books, you could be making $100,000 a year. None of it matters if you don’t bring your A game to the assignment you’re working on today.

As an editor, I’ve seen this a lot. To say it’s frustrating is an understatement. Every editor wants to think their publication is the No. 1 priority of the writers they work with. For some writers, it is, or at least, they do an admirable job of making it look that way. But I’ve also worked with good writers – really good ones – who don’t always turn in work that’s up to their potential, because they are over-committed, focused on other things, or just being lazy (though I hate to think so).

I’ve worked as a writer long enough, too, to know that giving your best performance day in and day out is difficult. You get sick, or your kids get sick. Sources don’t call so you get behind and then have to play catch up and can’t do as good a job as you wanted. I get it.

But those occasions should be the anomalies.

In the end, the writers who’ll go furthest aren’t just the ones with the natural abilities (and the best agents). They’re the one who – like Heisman Trophy winners and Super Bowl champs – push themselves day after day, year after year, to make the most of their natural abilities and experience. They may be good, but they put in the effort too.

Is it a good thing or a bad thing to be an independently employed writer? The authors of two articles in my recommended reading list for this week come down on two very different sides of this issue. Which do you agree with?

Stop Crying That There Are No Jobs. Create One. (Afford Anything) – Blogger and former newspaper reporter Paula Pant shares the “aha” moment she had after attending recent back-to-back journalism and blogging conferences. There’s never been a better time to be a journalist, she says, if you can think like an entrepreneur.

Why ‘Branding’ Won’t Save the Creative Class (Salon) - Au contraire, says Scott Timberg in lengthy thinker piece that decries the toll the last decade has taken on writers, graphic designers and other creative types. As great as it is, he says, free agency doesn’t offer the kinds of safety nets – think health insurance – that people need to survive.

How Tiziano Project Beat CNN and NPR in the New Journalism Paradigm (PBS MediaShift) – The head of a journalism project in Iraqi Kurdistan explains how they beat larger, more well-financed media organizations to capture a 2011 Online Journalism Award for best community collaboration. “We are at the bleeding edge of what the future of journalism could be,” writes Jon Vidar in his recap. “The future of journalism is collaboration – collaboration as a means of presenting all sides of a story and providing every individual, whether in a conflict zone or on Wall Street, with the ability to present their voice to the world.” The Tiziano Project|360 Kurdistan presents stories from journalists alongside personal accounts of Iraqi citizens to present “a robust and complete understanding of life, culture and news in present-day Iraqi Kurdistan.”

Ebert Memoir Full of Surprises (SecondAct)- My friend and fellow SecondAdt blogger Pat Kiger can write on just about everything. I know, because he’s covered corporate finance for me for American Express Inside Edge, but he’s equally good writing about movies, music and pop culture. His review of movie critic Roger Ebert’s autobiography is a case in point: educated, insightful and a great read.

How to Rank Highly in Google News (ReadWriteWeb) – Just got around to reading this Sept. 26 synopsis of a new study from three SEO experts on the best way to optimize stories to show up higher in Google search results. The results aren’t shocking: use strong keywords and short headlines, share what you write on social networks, work at getting your work cited by other sources. Though this is aimed at publishers, it’s good advice for bloggers too.

Annie Proulx was 53 when her first short story collection was published.

She started writing after her kids were raised and out of the house, because that’s just how you did it back then, Proulx told the audience at a Literary Arts lecture in Portland recently.

Even though she waited until a relatively advanced age to start writing, Proulx, 76, was always a reader. When she was young, she choose which books to read based on the color of their covers. She read constantly, as did the rest of the her family. At dinner they’d all have books, she told the audience.

Being a reader helped when Proulx went back to school later in life and went on to become a prize-winning author of Shipping News, short stories including “Brokeback Mountain,” and her latest, an autobiography about her Wyoming home called Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place. That’s just one of the things I learned during her lecture – to be a writer, you have to be a reader.

Here are some other lessons on the art and craft of writing I picked up from listening to and reading Proulx:

1. It doesn’t matter where you start. Proulx didn’t launch her writing career with fiction. Like a lot of other writers, she started small and worked her way up. Some of her first pieces were articles for horticulture magazines, then books on rural living. Her inspiration for writing fiction came from feelings of “looking for some unspecified place, something out there,” she says. “I think everyone has those feelings, but it’s difficult to know how to get them on the page.”

2. Let the place drive the story. Proulx is the first to say that place informs her writing more than character, more than plot, more than anything. That’s apparent in her 2008 collection of Wyoming short stories, Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3. If there’s a protagonist in her tales, is the land, which remains a steady force – at times beautiful or malevolent – as people come and go. By her own admission, Proulx tends to fall in love with places, and then write about them. She liked Newfoundland so much after a vacation there she bought a cabin and spent seven or eight summers there before making it the setting of The Shipping News. She had similar experiences with Texas Panhandle and Wyoming before writing stories set there. “It’s a dangerous habit,” she says.

3. Interviews are optional. When asked at the Literary Arts lecture whether she does background interviews for her books, Proulx said simply: “No.” With one exception. For Accordian Crimes, a collection of related short stories set in Texas, Proulx did interviews to understand how accordians were made and repaired.

4. Learn to love research. Proulx is researching her next book, which has to do with trees and forests, a project that so far has taken her to Canada, Indonesia and New Zealand. Proulx loves research, and says if you write, you better like it too.

5. Take your time. Proulx’s not one to rush a book. She’s a quarter of the way into writing the forest book, and doesn’t expect to finish until 2014, or after. “It’s going to take a while,” she says. But when she’s done, she’s done and editors don’t have to do much to her manuscripts. “There aren’t many changes,” she says. Not everyone has the sort of time of a prize-winning and highly compensated novelist does when it comes to finishing projects. My takeaway from this: whatever you’re working on and whatever your timeline, give yourself leeway to get it right.

6. Don’t look back. Proulx doesn’t spending a lot of time reflecting on past accomplishment. “I’m not a person who looks back or analyzing my writing,” she says. Instead, she prefers to concentrate on what she’s working on now.

7. To do good writing read, a lot. Her love affair with books didn’t stop when Proulx started writing. When she built Bird Cloud, her home in Wyoming, she says she finally got a house with enough room for all her books. How many does she have? At any given time, she’s got eight or 10 stacked on her nightstand. “It’s like oxygen and the air to me,” she says.

8. Follow that editor. When Proulx had worked with at Esquire left for Scribners, she followed him, a move that eventually that led to the publication of her first short-story collection. My takeaway: editors are your friends. When you have a good working relationship with one, especially one who appreciates and champions your work, it pays to go where they go.

9. It’s OK to have favorites. Asked which of her stories she likes best, Proulx mentioned “Tits Up in a Ditch,” a contemporary story from Fine Just the Way It Is about a Wyoming girl who joins the Army to get away from the series of setbacks that’s shaped her life only to encounter more of the same, a tale as tersely told and tragic as “Brokeback Mountain,” and bleakly beautiful for it.

10. Inspiration takes many forms. Proulx doesn’t mold characters after any real-life people, and when pressed, says only that it’s possible she draws inspiration from what’s happening around her. For example, the characters of Ennis and Jack in “Brokeback Mountain” may have sprung from some unconscious desire to counteract the “John Wayne, right-wing” mindset where she lives in Wyoming that cowboys can only be and act a certain way, she says. “I realize stories I’ve written are contrary to the culture and have a touch of the corrective about them,” she says. “I’m not saying that’s how it is, I’m saying, perhaps.”